Main image: A key part of the culture desk’s strategy is the Hamburger Abendblatt’s culture newsletter, Zugabe (“Encore”).The more than 5,100 newsletter subscribers were offered an exclusive discounted subscription offer, and the team surveyed newsletter subscribers to better understand their interests.
Challenging conventional wisdom, the Abendblatt team’s journey with Table Stakes Europe has allowed them to prove that regional cultural content, when done well, CAN attract new digital subscribers. The successes of the culture desk are now inspiring change in the wider newsroom.
Based in the German city of Hamburg, the Hamburger Abendblatt has a strong local focus and covers the city’s metropolitan area across the newspaper’s different sections. It has been part of the FUNKE Media Group, Germany’s third largest newspaper and magazine publisher, since 2014.
The Hamburger Abendblatt has a paid circulation of 124,000 Monday to Friday, 148,000 on Saturday, as well as 28,000 e-paper subscribers. It was the first newspaper in Germany to feature paid articles online (2009), and has had a paywall since 2016.
Irrevocable principles were once part of everyday life for many news publishers. For decades, they applied and were hardly questioned. With the digital age and constantly changing market habits, that has come to an end. But even in the new era, there are theories that are considered almost unassailable. Such as: regional cultural content will win you few – if any – digital subscribers.
But the team at Hamburger Abendblatt, a newspaper belonging to the Funke Media Group in Germany, has achieved the Galileo effect in Table Stakes Europe: it has proven what was once thought to be almost unprovable. Galileo Galilei once claimed that the earth moved around the sun and that the millennia-old belief to the contrary was wrong. Today we know he was right. At the time, he stood alone with his thesis.
“We believed from the outset that high-quality cultural content could persuade many users to take out digital subscriptions,” said Maike Schiller, Head of the Editorial Culture Team at Abendblatt. To help this happen, they applied to Table Stakes Europe – together with their colleague Felix Freudenthal from the marketing and events department and Deputy Editor-in-Chief Cordula Schmitz.
The challenge centred on a cultural audience, which was a “great and bold idea that we were only too happy to support,” said Martin Fröhlich, the TSE coach of the Abendblatt team and Director of WAN-IFRA’s Digital Revenue Network. “During my time in regional publishing houses, I was also repeatedly confronted with the theory that it is very difficult to reach a regional cultural audience digitally. And that was usually true.”
‘How do our cultural colleagues do it?’
But Maike Schiller and her colleague Holger True knew the strength of their city. “Hamburg is an outstanding regional and national cultural centre with many people who are interested in all kinds of culture,” they said. Even before Table Stakes, the culture department regularly brought in digital subscriptions.
At the end of the one-year journey with Table Stakes Europe, the desk’s content performs at a level that surprises other editorial departments and makes them sit up and take notice. “How do our cultural colleagues do it?” is a recurring question.
The number of subscriptions generated by culture content rose from 508 in 2022 to 696 (+37 percent) in 2023 – while the number of articles published slightly fell. The number of subscriptions per article grew from 0.54 to an incredible 0.81. Reach also benefited from the new approach: the number of average page views per article rose from 2,344 to 4,575 – an impressive increase of 95 percent.
The path was not easy in the city of the Elbphilharmonie, Ohnsorgtheater, Laeiszhalle and all the other major venues. Especially as Abendblatt 2023 had to cope with further, far-reaching changes such as the introduction of a new editorial system and the conversion of the editorial workflow to digital-first. “On the one hand, these were additional challenges for the culture team, on the other, it ultimately supported the process in the Table Stakes programme,” Schmitz said.
A digital-first workflow is one of the core elements of successful work in TSE. Another core element is focusing on the interests of specific audiences. The Hamburg team initially began by looking at the question of what information their cultural readers need.
“It quickly became clear that service information about events was very well received by the audience,” True said.
Generating subscriptions with culture content
In line with the basic idea of Table Stakes, the culture department at Hamburger Abendblatt became a mini-publishing team for culture. A team that not only produces editorial content but also thinks and works like a small publishing house.
One example of this is the new cruise audience that the Abendblatt is targeting. Cruises have great thematic potential in Germany’s largest harbour city and the surrounding area. Felix Freudenthal’s team has published a second cruise guide that is better tailored to the audience. Advertising revenue promptly increased by 40 percent.
“With a regular newsletter, an improved website and the Cruise Guide Award, we want to build a community of loyal readers,” Freudenthal said.
The concept of a pop-up audience, an audience that only exists temporarily but has an intense need for information, proved to be particularly suitable for the culture mini-publishing team during the Table Stakes year. “We chose the Bruce Springsteen concert in Hamburg as the event,” said Maike Schiller.
Instead of providing a general review of the music legend’s performance as usual, the team came up with a whole package of content relating to the concert. The effort paid off – readers took out 71 subscriptions from Springsteen-related content.
And as if creating a Galileo effect wasn’t enough, the North-German company also proved that even reviews of classical concerts can persuade readers to take out digital subscriptions. “This content is so successful that we are now offering even more concert reviews than before and are looking for new authors. That surprised even us,” said the culture team.
The Abendblatt will continue along the Table Stakes path. In a second stage of expansion, the culture team will focus on new specific cultural audiences. The first of these are readers interested in the successful Harry Potter show in Hamburg. A new podcast was created for this, sponsored by the show organisers and has therefore been directly monetised.
A second audience are the 40,000 men and women who sing in Hamburg’s choirs. There will be customised editorial content for them as well as activities that increase engagement with the Abendblatt brand. “We are planning a major choir event in Hamburg and even want to set up a readers’ choir,” said Maike Schiller.
Internally, the successful principle of mini-publishing will be transferred to other teams in the newsroom. “The culture team has become the driving force behind this change for us,” said Cordula Schmitz. Maybe that will become the new irrevocable principle at the Abendblatt.